“If you look at the content and context, there is so much good in Sharia,” said Ibrahim, from her office at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, where she has spent the last year researching Sharia defense strategies.

Ibrahim hopes her writings will be used by lawyers tasked with defending clients in a Sharia system, as well as read by Westerners whose preconceptions about Sharia only antagonize the judges and public whom Ibrahim must convince.

Statements that offend the judges or anger the public, she said, can in turn jeopardize her clients.

“They don’t know how the system works,” Ibrahim said of Sharia’s critics. “I know the system.”

“Sharia can work, but we must ensure that all those norms of respect for the rights of life, for dignity, for Islam, are all incorporated,” she said.

Despite her faith in justice, Ibrahim acknowledges that the situation for women in northern Nigeria will only improve if and when men change their attitudes. Ibrahim has tried to foster that change at home, requiring her two young sons to cook, clean and wash their socks by hand, even though their Massachusetts home has a washing machine.

“I have tried as a mother,” she said, “to help them see the world from a realistic point of view.”

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The amazing part of this praising of shari’a is that women so willingly allow themselves to be subjugated and persecuted. Must have something to do with their believing in shari’a is the way to Paradise. That’s a hard belief to combat with a reasoned argument.